Download ShaliniUrs

Managing the Content and
engaging the nation in its content
management:
The WikiGyan Experience
Shalini R. Urs
International School of Information Management
University of Mysore
Mysore, India
[email protected]
Let us understand content first ?
Content, therefore, is information that you
tag with data so that a computer can
organize and systematize its collection,
management, and publishing
• Raw information becomes content when it is
given a usable form intended for one or more
purposes.
• Increasingly, the value of content is based
upon the combination of its primary usable
form, along with its application, accessibility,
usage, usefulness, brand recognition, and
uniqueness.
Content is information plus data
Outline
• Information Friction and Information Sharing
Environments
• Content Management Technologies and Tools
• Engaging the Nation
• WikiGyan Case Study
– WikiGyan Process Model
– Core Guiding Principles
– Evolution of the Model – strategy and approach
– Architecture and Technology Platforms
– Modules
• Exemplar of ‘engaging the nation in its service’
Information Friction ( Asymmetry )
• Information friction or information
asymmetry refers to the absence of
systems that foster free-flowing ( sharing)
information .
• It happens when key facts, figures, data,
records, content, best practices and process
knowledge that are imperative for the
successful functioning of a society, are
wholly or mostly unavailable.
• Various kinds of societal data – such as a
political candidate’s crime records or assets or
performance or the toxic emissions from
industries or the geo referenced ground
water level depletion data, are needed to
make critical decisions.
Data, data every where but…
• Many organisations - Government agencies Non
Government Organisations (NGOs),, academic
researchers and others routinely collect enormous
amounts of data pertaining to our society – socio
economic, demographic, and governmental, health,
and education.
• If only there were information systems and
information management tools that were developed
to harness these data, much of the existing
information friction problems could be solved
Content Management Technologies
and Tools
• A variety of Content Management tools are
available today that can very effectively be
deployed for managing the diverse kinds of
data, mine them, analyse and provide
business intelligence and insights
• Companies deploy such tools to build
information systems that enable them to use
these data analytics and insights for business
strategies and decision making.
Content Management Technologies
and Tools
• Text Mining, Data Mining and Business
Intelligence are some of the key fields that are
gaining grounds in these days of ‘information’
assets management in the business
environments.
• Enterprise Content Management is a niche
area that develops and deploys these tools for
the purpose of enhancing the performance of
an enterprise.
• In Politics and Governance as well, it is being
used quite effectively as decision support
systems.
• Policy makers need aggregated and analysed
data for drafting government policies.
• One of the factors attributed to the success of
US President Obama’s campaign is his very
strategic use of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICTs) for
managing data, for gaining insights and taking
appropriate and immediate actions.
US Government Data
• Last year the Washington DC government
launched a sleek contest - the 'Apps for
Democracy' contest to encourage developers
to build applications using its data –
http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/
• Government is increasingly putting much of its
public records online, creating opportunities
for developers to build useful applications for
citizens.
• From being alerted to neighbourhood crime to
finding the best mass transit routes, these
data visualization mashups are helping solve
everyday problems.
• This underscores how properly
applied CMS techniques can help
users make sense and use of
government and NGO collected
data.
http://mashable.com/2008/11/13/
government-mashups
The good news is …
• A plethora of open access content
management tools that makes developing
content management tools and building
information systems, fairly easy are available
• What is the missing link – an effective and
scalable model
• In today’s world – what is scalable is the
participatory information sharing model of the
Web 2.0 technologies
The Wikipedia model
• What Wikipedia has done to unstructured
information. You do not find some information
on some topic ? Then go and put it up!
• Creating an information sharing environment
for data sets.
• We need a kind of data – pedia or data
compendium
Engaging the nation
• The Indian society consists of two segments – the
developed and the emerging.
• The developed India (the privileged 10% ) that
includes among them the educated, professionals ,
technologists, bureaucrats, academicians, Government
officials, and NGO workers who are literate, have
access to these information sharing environments.
• The other 90% constitutes the ‘other’ India, or the
‘emerging India’, which is not educated, and has no
access to these information sharing environments
• Engaging the nation is the process of engaging the
developed India in solving the problems of emerging
India
Engaging the nation…
• What is being proposed and conceptualised here is a
vision of building information systems involving
different stakeholders – governments, NGOs,
Academia and the industry through a process of well
defined dialogue and engagement.
• It is a variant of the Open Source Development
model – a Community Development Model which is
directed under a broad framework of development
model and a developer community.
• This ‘engaging the nation’ concept has been piloted
through an experimental project called WikiGyan and
the same is explicated in the following sections.
Education | Empowerment | Engagement
What is WikiGyan?
• It is a project to build an information system to empower
every citizen with information and insight to build a civil
society, an effective democracy and eGovernance.
• It is a system (of data and software tools and solutions) built
by a student developer community at the International School
of Information Management (ISiM), University of Mysore;
mentored and monitored by a volunteer community of
industry leaders ( from Google, Yahoo and others), in
response to and engagement with an NGO – the Deshapande
Foundation.
• It is a live and living project – enabling the student community
to learn, build and contribute
WikiGyan
• WikiGyan aims to enable people/organizations to
share data on the society (elections, health,
education…) and gain insights through data analytics
and intelligence based on the tools developed and
integrated into the system.
• For simplicity you could call this a combo of a
YouTube for spreadsheets and Wikipedia for
structured information.
• A system that lets people to upload spreadsheets,
down load them, build databases, Data warehousing
through the process of ETL ( extract, transform and
load) and visualise data in different ways.
WikiGyan Process Model
• Education and Engagement
• Resurrect the waste land of student projects.
• The vast majority of the student community across
the nation, continuously build, refine and fine-tune
the system and enable NGOs, Governments, and
researchers to upload their data.
• The focus is especially on harnessing the power of
students, and the voluntary involvement of industry
and NGOs and others.
The Core Guiding Principles
• Open & Democratic System of
development (driven by passion and built
by capability and competence )
• Technical Excellence – to build a best of
the breed information system
• Involvement and engagement –
Compelled by passion and driven
through capability and competence,
people get involved
Core principles…
• Reach for the stars (High level
framework) blended with low hanging
fruits first approach – find it , fix it, fine
tune it model
• Unleashing the students’ potential and
passion – bootstrapping through student
project work and scaling greater heights
of quality & standards through industry
and NGOs /user groups engagement
• Understanding the Process Model
Education
• Integrating the project work with their
curriculum and academic programme
• Tying the different courses into a over all
project thereby providing better
understanding of how each course fits into the
over all academic program and its goals of an
academic program in information systems and
management.
Blending good learning models
• Active Learning - learners interacting with an environment;
manipulating the objects and observing the effects of their
manipulations; students explore and construct their own
experiences.
• Authentic learning – solving real world problems .Tasks connect the
learners to the world outside them
• Constructive Learning: Learners constructing their understanding
and building their knowledge requiring that the learners find
problems to be solved, explore multiple solutions to accepted
problems, exemplify errors to clarify and refine knowledge
• Cooperative Learning: Students work in groups with specific tasks
and roles assigned to each one of them, shift roles and
responsibilities and communicate within and outside their team working towards achieving targets, and reaching goals
Engagement
• Engaging the students to contribute – all the
students of an institution ( in this particular
case ISiM) are involved
• Engaging the industry mentors – many
thought leaders, project managers, product
managers, team leaders from the information
industry contributing to the project through
their mentorship and participation
• Engaging the community – Governments,
NGOs and other community to share their
informational problems and providing insights
What is unique ?
• Scalability ( hundreds of thousands of student
community participating as developers, testers and
QA )
• Impact is transformational –
– Transforming pedagogy - Bringing out the best in the
students potential.
– Transforming and achieving Academia–industry
engagement. Visionaries, Product managers, program
managers, coders and other professionals from the
industry adding to, monitoring, mentoring and ensuring
quality and delivery of the product
– Ground Truthing the system by engaging the end users (
NGOs, and others)
• Societal – a new model of nation building and
Social Service – SST ( Social Service through
Technology)
• Engagement - Engages Industry , academia
and society
• Reality check – problem definition by the
community and reality checking by the
community
WikiGyan Case Study
• Curriculum and project synergy
The four modules of Content
Management
– The overarching broad vision of building an
Information systems ( a YouTube and Wikipedia
combo for structured data) was broken down into
four modules
•
•
•
•
Module 1 - upload and download module;
Module 2 - metadata and resource discovery ;
Module 3 - data integration ;
Module 4 - data visualisation
Technology Platform:
•
Xampp for Linux 1.6: XAMPP is great
because it takes only a few commands to get
a fully integrated LAMP system up and
running. Installing the Components
separately has typically been quite difficult
and also a problem with having a number of
separate open source components in its
integration like Apache server, PHP, MySql.
Data Integration and ETL using Pentaho Kettle
Search by Keyword
Upload
Search
by
Browser Component
and
Category
Upload
Keyword and
(Ajax,
Javascript, CSS, XHTML)
Meta
Tag
Category
Metatag
Category
File list
Download
Category
Category
Visualize
Visualise
Metadata
Mediawiki
Repository
Database
ETL
Data
warehouse
Pentaho
Cleansed
Excel
-------------- Proposed data flow
__________Concrete structure
• Mediawiki 1.13.1(web based wiki software):
MediaWiki offers a lot of features, including
an optional file upload feature, a very
comprehensive mark-up, very good
internationalization support. MediaWiki is
written in PHP and uses a MySQL database.
Installation is incredibly simple. It is built to
work in almost any Web - hosting
environment where HTML can also be used.
• Pentaho is a is Open Source application
software for enterprise reporting, analysis,
dashboard, data mining, workflow and ETL
capabilities for Business Intelligence (BI) needs.
It is easy to use and scalable and is being
endorsed by the open source community. It
has comprehensive capabilities include data
integration, data mining and business
intelligence and reporting. Kettle and WEKA
are integrated parts of Pentaho